Articles

ILP@120: Anna Turley to address ILP Weekend School

Prospective Parliamentary candidate Anna Turley will address the ILP’s annual gathering of members and friends at Scarborough’s Esplanade Hotel this weekend. Turley will speak on emerging co-operative alternatives to public sector privatisation as part of a two-day programme of political discussions entitled ‘Ethical Socialism, Capitalism and the State’....

The Future of the NHS

Martin Rathfelder, director of the Socialist Health Association, will speak about the future of the health service at Dronfield Labour Party’s May Day public discussion meeting....

ILP@120: Jennie Lee – A Child of the ILP

KATH CONNOLLY delves into the early life of socialist firebrand Jennie Lee, finding a woman steeped in the ILP and the politics she learned at the family fireside in Fife. Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s I remember Jennie Lee as a small, grey-haired woman, a fiery speaker and chair of Labour Party conference....

The death of Thatcher – your views

Glenn Greenwald writing in the Guardian earlier this week argued that upon their demise public figures are due a frank, rather than a respectful assessment. The ‘death etiquette’ which means we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, should not apply to public figures. The demand for ‘respectful silence’ is politically irresponsible. During Margaret Thatcher’s time...

ILP@120: Alfred Salter & the Bermondsey Revolution

GRAHAM TAYLOR celebrates the life and achievements of Alfred Salter, the brilliant doctor, Bermondsey MP and lifelong ILPer who helped transform an impoverished corner of south east London. His life is chiefly known from Fenner Brockway’s 1949 classic of political biography, Bermondsey Story, which describes in moving terms how the young doctor dedicated his life...

ILP@120: Once Upon a Time in the Midlands

DAVID HOWELL remembers DH Lawrence and ‘the Eastwood circle’, a dissenting academy in Nottinghamshire ‘with the ILP at its heart’. Its lost world of Edwardian socialism shows that while ‘vision is essential, it is never enough’. The Eastwood circle epitomised the ILP's moral politics at a moment of optimism and diversity – a politics of...

Two Hundred Brigaders Pay Homage to Orwell

Over 200 people assembled at the Manchester Conference Centre on Saturday 2 March to take part in the annual IBMT (International Brigade Memorial Trust) Len Crome Lecture. The title of the day’s conference was ‘Homage to Catalonia 75 years on’....

Poverty Knocks

ERNIE JACQUES looks at the implications of a recent appeal court ruling on the case of two jobseekers denied benefits for refusing unpaid work....

One Nation Labour Debates

Meetings about the Labour Party’s ‘one nation’ modernisation process have been coming thick and fast in the last few weeks, the latest batch a series of three at the Houses of Parliament organised by Compass, Progress and the Labour Policy Review....